It would be awesome if some of the sites could share questions via similar tags. I.E. questions tagged game-dev on StackOverflow would showup here, and questions here tagged stack-overflow would showup on StackOverflow. Just a thought I had while pondering the OPs question. That would help make the overlap less of an issue, I'm not sure what the other issues that would bring up are...
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NateSep 10 '10 at 15:16

That would be perfect for me - the programming questions would still go into the Stack Overflow. However, I am afraid this is not what most people here expect from it, as they mostly expect game development programming questions to be asked here as well.
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SumaSep 9 '10 at 7:22

4

I thin that programming questions that have specific game requirements, i.e. wouldn't be exactly the same in any non-game program, still belong here. Most of your low level optimization type questions fall into the exactly the same... category
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lathomas64Sep 10 '10 at 15:18

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To add to that: Game specific programming knowledge. You can't just shuffle off programming to stack overflow. Knowledge of tangent-space normals, path-finding optimisation and shader hardware just isn't in the broad domain. Even on gamedev I seem to be able to find questions too specialised in gaming programming knowledge to get answers. On SO they don't have a chance!
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RushyoSep 12 '10 at 11:18

Your question is of particular interest to me, because I have the accepted and highest upvoted answer on the example of a programming question (one about optimisation) you think should be on Stack Overflow.

Here is a similar question on Stack Overflow. Someone actually made the point I want to make in the comments: "Optimizations depend on the context". You have to go half way down the page to find a brief mention of cache coherency - something to which I dedicated an entire (and seemingly very popular) answer. Clearly, for some programming questions, context is important.

The kind of programming problems that come up here on the GameDev site (example of mine) are very different to those that come up on Stack Overflow (another example of mine - game related but better on SO). Or at very least should do so.

And obviously there will be some fuzzyness. And it would be good if we had a way to punt questions between the two sites. But that is a small price to pay for the value of having a pool of domain-specific knowledge on this site.

(And it almost goes without saying that there are many other aspects of game development - art and business to name two big categories - that are clearly not suited to Stack Overflow).

StackOverflow is very, very active. It takes less than 5 minutes for something to disappear off the original view of the page. If you're looking for just game development questions to answer, they're difficult to find.

Something that only just breaches game development...say memory management, for example, should be on stack overflow. But some programming questions are more suited for here; things like 'how can I do pathfinding effectively' (bad example?), aiming at the algorithm side.

I think most people who are capable of answering questions well have their front page filtered to some degree; e.g. I have anything related to JQuery, SQL, PHP, and most Windows-specific topics ignored. The page is much slower for me. :)
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user744Sep 10 '10 at 16:25

I've got...about 40 tags filtered, and it still is too fast. :)
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The Communist DuckSep 12 '10 at 18:25

This is something that I wonder about too. The SO communities that I participate in (notably the C++ one) have a lot of people who are very hostile to the idea of "restricted C++." Any answer that doesn't make conspicuous use of std:: items gets downvoted, etc., etc. I feel that the programming challenges of games, while not unique to games, do not tend to hit an appropriate audience on SO. That said- anything not specifically game related I'll ask there, but it does always hurt me to see highly upvoted answers from folks who obviously don't understand the requirements.
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dash-tom-bangSep 14 '10 at 1:48

Whenever I've asked game-dev-related questions on SO, I've gotten redirected to either Gamedev.net, the XNA forums, or here (in fact, that's how I discovered this place!)

I feel that game development really is a much different beast than normal software development, as I'm still relatively lost in making my first game, despite having about 5-6 years of non-game development experience.